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Trending innovation programs

TRIZ law of system completeness states simply that all systems needs an engine, transmission, tool and a control touching all the 3 to perform usefully. That is a heavy automobile metaphor to begin with and needs a translation to plain english and business. I will try to translate in stages, and then apply 2 other trends (again from the TRIZ portfolio) on the parts itself to see how we can forcefully evolve or design innovation programs.

System Element

First translation

Second level translation to business

Engine

source of raw power, muscle, energy

Needs or wants in several spheres of customers, Investments that can give raw power ($, signals and time)

Transmission

channel, deliver, route the energy

Conveying need and investment to the tool which will actually create/generate solutions

Tool

do the function, purposeful action, perform

Performing the function ranging from solution generation, prototyping, testing solution, and finally delivering it to the customers

Control

govern, command, supervise, moderate the parts above

Governing all the above 3 through a system, process, or management structure

While we can recursively apply the completeness law to the parts also, it is not very useful for program design. So I will now go further with applying my 2 favorite trends

1. Transition to Super system and

2. Transition to micro-level.

System Element

Applying Transition to Micro level

Applying Transition to Super system

Needs or wants in several spheres of customers, Investments that can give raw power ($, signals and time)

How can we find large number of small needs from the existing customer base?

How can we make the investment size below a threshold (so no approval flows kick in)?

How can we allow employee to invest in his own idea as money, time and effort?

Who is the customer’s customer, investor’s investor, director’s director, etc?

Where are potential customers beyond who we are targeting now with the ideas?

How can we translate external customer comments into needs? And those needs to demand?

Conveying need and investment to the tool which will actually create/generate solutions

How can we convey needs from customers to large number of groups internally?

How can our budgeting and investment management process allow money to flow into the small projects?

How will customers test large number of potential solutions created from the small groups?

How can we sell the value proposition of the idea for competition to invest?

What are the need spheres of employees you can leverage like family, interests, networks, communities?

Performing the innovation function ranging from solution generation, prototyping, testing solution, and finally giving it to the customers

How can time to prototype be reduced?

What ways exist to test the solution with many groups of users?

How to deliver individual functions to many customers?

How can we generate solutions that will need zero-minimal investments?

What are the current start-ups with solutions already developed for the need?

Are there academic interests around the need?

Is there government funding available?

How can we get from 1 large strategy to many small safe-fail experiments?

Governing all the above 3 through a system, process, or management structure

Who all can be part of the governing structure?How can it be brought down to immediate reporting manager level?

What processes need to be adaptive to allow small-scale governance?

How can quarterly reporting be made bi-weekly reporting?

How can data be collected automatically to report continuously?

How can the steering committee be forced to look at large number of ideas?

….

It is now possible to look at different open innovation programs and see which trend became true and how their application is. May be in another post soon…